GOOGLE Permanently Bans 200 Sites in Crackdown on Fake News

The War has Begun

Since its latest policy against mainstream media’s “fake news” narrative was passed (and enforced), Google permanently banned 200 publishers/internet sites from accessing Google’s AdSense service for the crime of posting fake news stories among other things thus killing their revenue.

According to a blog post on Wednesday, Google’s director of product management for sustainable ads Scott Spencer said that the alphabet company banned internet web sites from their AdSense advertising service for various reasons, including sites containing misleading ads or ads for illegal products, malware ads/bad ads on mobile, ads trying to game/trick the system and those promoting and profiting from “bad” websites.

However, Google focused on the fake-news category which was the buzz word in the mainstream media for the last 2 months.

Let’s quote Mr. Spencer himself:

In 2016, we saw the rise of tabloid cloakers, a new type of scammer that tries to game our system by pretending to be news. Cloakers often take advantage of timely topics—a government election, a trending news story or a popular celebrity—and their ads can look like headlines on a news website. But when people click on that story about Ellen DeGeneres and aliens, they go to a site selling weight-loss products, not a news story.

We’ve had long-standing policies prohibiting AdSense publishers from running ads on sites that help people deceive others, like a site where you buy fake diplomas or plagiarized term papers. In November, we expanded on these policies, introducing a new AdSense misrepresentative content policy, that helps us to take action against website owners misrepresenting who they are and that deceive people with their content.

After Google was roasted over its handling of so called fake news stories, especially after a patent fake news website was allowed by Google’s smart algorithms to rise to the top of search results,despite its blatant pedaling of an incorrect story which claimed that Trump won the popular vote in the 2016 Presidential election, Mr. Spencer explained today that Google expanded, revised and improved its policies and methods against sites, bad ads and scammers which are trying to mislead the general public:

From November to December 2016, we reviewed 550 sites that were suspected of misrepresenting content to users, including impersonating news organizations. We took action against 340 of them for violating our policies, both misrepresentation and other offenses, and nearly 200 publishers were kicked out of our network permanently.

Google took down approximately 1.7 bn ads in 2016, a more than 50% increase over the 780 mn removed (found in violation of Google’s policies) in 2015, but it wasn’t just “fake news”.

We took action on 47,000 sites for promoting content and products related to weight-loss scams.

We took action on more than 15,000 sites for unwanted software and disabled 900,000 ads for containing malware.

And we suspended around 6,000 sites and 6,000 accounts for attempting to advertise counterfeit goods, like imitation designer watches.

About 5 million ads promoting predatory-pay day loans were disabled in the last half of 2016 after Google prohibited the use thereof and also among those banned and removed were what Google calls tabloid cloakers (clickbait titles which pop up ads for various producsts).

However, Google did not revealed the list of the 200 banned perma-banned websites.